Chapter 12. International trade, standards and regulations Learning objective

5. How exactly is solving the problem of technical barriers in the WTO? 
In 1995 with the creation of the WTO came into force, among other agreements, two 
very important agreements, which are directly relevant to the subject of our section, namely 
the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement) and the Sanitary and 
Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS Agreement).These agreements help to ensure that national 
regulations and conformity assessment procedures to their requirements will not create 
unnecessary barriers to trade. Let’s consider the basic conceptual ideas of the TBT 
Agreement. Similar ideas are laid down in the SPS Agreement. 
1) To eliminate in reasonably short time the difference in mandatory requirements for 
the same goods in different countries-members of the WTO, the TBT Agreement 
obliges them to pass on in this area to the unified international standards developed 
by international standardization organizations on a priority basis and taking into 
account the mandatory requirements. 
In its turn, the SPS Agreement requires WTO members that their national measures to protect 
their territories with the aspects of the Agreement also will be based on international standards 

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and other documents, which are developed and agreed upon in international organizations 
such as the International Organization for Standardization in respect of technical regulations 
and the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the International Office of Epizootics and the 
International Plant Protection Convention in respect of sanitary and phytosanitary measures. 
2) To eliminate the difference in procedures of the compliance WTO member states 
are obliged to pass on to united international documents on the procedures mainly 
developed by the ISO Committee on conformity assessment (CASCO) (see below). 
3) Exactly on the basis of the above-mentioned international documents member 
countries shall develop: 

technical regulations establishing requirements for products, processes and 
production methods, compliance with which are compulsory (in this context as 
technical regulations are also considered legal documents such as laws, provisions 
and orders of government and governmental bodies, other legal acts concerning 
the scope of the TBT and SPS Agreements); 

standards and rules adopted by a recognized body that set the rules, guidance or 
requirements for products features or related processes and production methods, 
compliance with which is not mandatory; 

conformity assessment procedures. 
4) Mass increasing compliance with the first two ideas of methodological unity 
("requirements uniformity", "uniformity of decision-making procedures of conformity") 
created the basis for the gradual development of bilateral, multilateral, regional, and at the 
last step of international agreements on mutual recognition of conformity assessment 
documents in different countries between them. In the customs clearance area remain only 
procedures of collection of established import and export duties. The end result of the 
development of this approach should be a significant simplification of customs clearance 
procedures for goods carried from country to country thanks to mass transfer to the 
electronic exchange of confirming compliance documents and to electronic forms of 
payment of the required customs duties and thanks to sharp reduction in time and in 
financial cost of inspection of goods and implementation of export-import operations. In 
many ways, it has been already realized.